Facebook is releasing an AI-powered tool called SapFix which aims to help software developers track down pesky bugs in their code.

SapFix detects errors in code and suggests possible fixes to developers. Currently, it fixes bugs spotted by Sapienz – a software testing tool by Facebook – but the company promises it will be able to find errors in any code.

Android P is nearing release and so Google has set out its guidelines for how the ‘notch’ found on many new devices should be accommodated.

Love it or hate it, the notch has become mainstream. First marketed by the first ‘Essential’ smartphone and quickly followed by other Android manufacturers to maximise the screen-to-device ratio, even Apple has adopted it with the iPhone X.

“Over-the-top”, or OTT, is the sexiest term in entertainment right now. We are on the cusp on significant change in a world that hasn’t changed a great deal in the last 50 years - and OTT sits at the centre of the inevitable and unstoppable merger between the worlds of television and digital video.

For app developers, as well as entertainment companies offering movies and TV shows on demand, the

Facebook’s woes over its handling of user data continue as it admits to leaking private information to external app testers.

The company accidentally sent analytic reports intended for developers and their direct employees to external app testers.

None of the emails contained personal information, but they did contain data which should be kept private to the developer such as views, average users, and other information which could be especially useful to a competitor.

Last week, we covered the exciting news that Google had added Linux app support to Chrome OS, allowing apps like Android Studio to run on Chromebooks. Now we're looking at things from another angle, as Google have added a Chrome OS emulator to Android Studio.

That means developers can now test how Android apps will run on Chrome OS, without needing to have physical access to a Chromebook themselves.

An open source tool for automated deployment monitoring has been launched by Netflix and Google to help other companies modernise their practices.

Kayenta is a form of ‘canary analysis’ tool which aims to detect problems before they become a serious issue. Fun fact: Coal miners would once take canaries in cages down into the pits as they are especially sensitive to dangerous gases — if a canary dies, the miners knew to make a quick exit.

DevOps is no longer a ‘nice to have’ to improve workflow for developers and software professionals, according to the latest study from software provider GitLab.

The company – whose mission is to provide software which supports the entire DevOps lifecycle – polled 5,296 software developers, CTOs and IT professionals, finding two in three say DevOps is a ‘tremendous time saver’ in the development process. 65% say the DevOps workflow saves them time – a figure which...

In today’s faster, smarter, cheaper centric world, with the technologies, tools and experience that software companies have at their disposal, you might assume that businesses would be able to create and release software that is (almost) defect free.

But, in truth, this is never the case. Many organizations knowingly release products with defects and others time box testing and release with areas of functionality unproven.

There are a lot of good reasons, from a business perspective, as to why this risk...

Minutes, seconds and milliseconds aren’t quite enough for Facebook – at least when it comes to synchronising video, anyway. The social giant has announced the launch of Flicks, a unit of time which can more easily subdivide media frame rates and sampling frequencies.

The unit – named Flick as a semi-portmanteau of ‘frame tick – is defined in C++ and represents 1/705600000 of a second. A flick is the smallest unit of time which can successfully represent a single frame duration...

In March this year, a curious issue was discovered on the Miele Professional PG 8528, a professional medical washer, that caught the attention of news outlets: “The corresponding embedded webserver "PST10 WebServer" typically listens to port 80 and is prone to a directory traversal attack;” the security flaw statement revealed, “therefore, an unauthenticated attacker may be able to exploit this issue to access sensitive information to aid in subsequent attacks. A Proof of...

Are you a proponent of static typing or dynamic typing in JavaScript, or indeed another language? A new study from researchers at University College London (UCL), alongside Microsoft, put a couple of products to the test – with pretty solid results.

The researchers tested Flow, Facebook’s static type system, and TypeScript – from Microsoft, of course – and found that, at a conservative estimate, each product can spot approximately 15% of bugs which would otherwise have ended up in...

Open source is awesome. Have you ever stopped to think how much of the technology you use today actually originates from open source? The Internet, Android phones, Mozilla Firefox, social media sites and Wikipedia have all been developed using open source. It’s all around you and it’s so ubiquitous that in March this year, a single programmer accidentally broke the Internet by deleting some of the open source code he’d created.

Ada Lovelace is known as the world’s first computer programmer. Her work with Charles Babbage to create the Analytics Engine, an early predecessor of the modern computer, was followed by the publication of the first, most elaborate and complete programme sketched out by a programmer.

She inspired the advent of the first modern computers, which gave rise to a new profession known as coders. But it was not until the software boom of the mid-90s that the demand for coders skyrocketed. It continues to grow to this day,...

General Motors is putting the accelerator down on their connected car plans with the launch of in-vehicle testing for developers.

As global car manufacturers race to become a leader in the connected car space, GM is hoping to woo developers with their NGI SDK. First released back in January, the SDK enabled app developers to emulate their apps but not test in production cars.

Oxford startup Diffblue has raised over £17 million in Series A funding to help launch its AI technology which helps to check the code of developers for mistakes.

While most IDEs feature built-in spelling checkers and similar assistive features, they don’t necessarily help to ensure the code is efficient and/or bug-free. Diffblue likens it to writing “The president of the USA is Donald Duck” in a word processor – it’s factually wrong, but it won’t be flagged as...

Embrace.io has announced it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding to help bolster its ‘first platform to provide performance feedback for mobile’ offering.

The round was led by a group of investors led by Eniac Ventures and comprises The Chernin Group, Techstars Ventures (TSV), BoxGroup, Walter Driver, co-founder and CEO of Scopely, Tikhon Bernstam, founder of Scribd and Parse, the founders of Burstly / Testflight, and executives from MoPub.

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